Fiji: Why Canberra is soft on military rule
The Australian government's expressions of delight and relief at the Fiji military's arrest of coup leader George Speight and hundreds of his supporters on July 26-27 signalled to the military brass that Canberra was ready to accept a period of military rule as long as "stability" was restored. The Australian government is no longer calling for the democratically elected Fiji Labour Party-led government to be reinstated, merely for an eventual return to "constitutional government".
The military-backed "interim" government, headed by "Prime Minister" Laisenia Qarase, has said that a new constitution to replace the one adopted in 1997 (the scrapping of the 1997 constitution was one of the first of Speight's demands agreed to by the military after his May 19 coup) will be ready in about 18 months. Elections based on the new constitution will not take place for a further 18 months.
Deposed Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry, who met Australian Prime Minister John Howard on July 31, told the August 1 Melbourne Age that the Australian government seems to be waiting to see whether the military-backed regime's constitutional review commission is "independent and transparent" before considering whether tougher measures are necessary.
Chaudhry then added: "How many times are we going to have a review of the constitution? Every time somebody loses an election we end up having an armed takeover of government, and a review process. It is not a very satisfactory way of dealing with the situation."
As Chaudhry diplomatically hinted, the Australian and other Western governments are ready to go along with the trampling of the Fijian people's democratic rights.
The coup begun by Speight and completed by the military was Fiji's third in 13 years. In 1987, two military coups were staged to depose a freely elected FLP-led government. The Australian government's response to the most recent crushing of democracy is almost a carbon copy of its reaction in 1987.
Elite threatened
By the time Fiji was granted independence in 1970, Britain had engineered a system that entrenched the political and social control of the eastern Melanesian-Fijian chiefs. The 1970 constitution institutionalised political discrimination against Indian Fijians. Britain bestowed on Fiji a military and police that were almost exclusively Melanesian Fijian.
The Alliance Party — dominated by the eastern chiefs, supported by Indian-Fijian and European capitalists and a key Cold War ally of the West — ruled until 1987.
It was a period of "stability" based on the political and ideological dominance of the eastern aristocratic elite bolstered by a political and economic accommodation with the Indian-Fijian business class.
Central to the system was the political exclusion of the Indian-Fijian farmers and workers (about 48% of the population) and the mass of Melanesian-Fijian commoners (also about 48%). The Fijian plebeians' consciousness of their common interests was hampered by the system of racial politics imposed by British colonialism and maintained by the post-colonial Melanesian-Fijian elite.
The Alliance Party's unexpected defeat by Timoci Bavadra's moderate, anti-nuclear FLP in 1987 threatened to upset this "stability". The rise of the FLP was a signal that the social force that the chiefly elite and its imperialist backers had long feared — the working people and poor, united across race lines — was beginning to emerge.
The FLP's election win was the product of irreversible changes taking place in Fijian society. The economy had been stagnating due to the weakening of the market for the country's main export, sugar. Melanesian Fijians moved to the cities and towns in increasing numbers looking for work. Many became active in the trade unions, where they began to cooperate with Indian-Fijian fellow workers.
Young urban Melanesians, freed from the chiefs' social control exercised through traditional village structures, began to question the elite's privileges and wealth. Students and educators at the Suva-based University of the South Pacific began to argue for class-based politics and a nuclear-free and independent Pacific.
In the western provinces, the chiefs — who had long been politically marginalised, first by the British and then by the dominant eastern elite — began to make alliances with Indian-Fijian farmers and the emerging labour movement.
These trends were personified in Bavadra, who was both a minor Melanesian-Fijian chief from the west and the leader of the Public Servants Association (with a Melanesian-Fijian membership approaching 50%).
The FLP was formed in 1985 in response to a wage freeze imposed on public servants. It united workers, farmers and influential Melanesian-Fijian leaders from the west. In the 1986 Suva City Council elections, the fledgling social democratic party won 39% of the vote.
1987
The FLP eluded the provisions of the race-based electoral system to win the April 1987 election in a coalition with the Indian-Fijian communal National Federation Party, with 28 seats to the Alliance's 24.
Paradoxically, the social evolution of Fijian society that had nourished the rise of multiracial class politics also kindled the extreme Melanesian-chauvinist Taukei ("landowners") movement based among marginalised commoners in urban areas.
While they too were unhappy at the privileges and corruption of the chiefs, their resentment was mainly directed at Indian-Fijian population. Unemployed Melanesian Fijians found themselves competing with Indian Fijians for jobs. They saw that many shops and small businesses in the towns were Indian-run and believed that Indian Fijian cane farmers, with long-term leases granted by the chiefs, denied Melanesian Fijians the right to work the land.
The election of the FLP-led government triggered a series of Taukei rallies and marches in Suva demanding "Fiji for Fijians". The eastern chiefs cynically aligned themselves with the Taukei mobs. Yet before the rise of the FLP, the Taukei commoners were also seen as a threat by the elite.
At the government's swearing in on the first day of parliament, just five Alliance MPs dared to turn up as thousands of Taukei mobilised outside. Seven days later, on May 14, a dozen masked men led by Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka stormed parliament and seized the government members at gunpoint. Former Alliance PM Ratu Mara joined Rabuka's government, and the Great Council of Chiefs endorsed the coup.
Rabuka's role
The intervention by the Fiji military had two goals, both necessary to maintain the rule of the eastern elite. The primary goal was to remove the immediate threat posed by the multiracial FLP. The second was to stall the Taukei movement's swelling mobilisations.
Rabuka's role was to shield the traditional chiefly power structure, while at the same time attempting to harness and direct the militant chauvinists. This required that he perform a delicate balancing act between them.
This was most clearly seen when Rabuka staged his second coup on September 25. It followed an accord between Mara and Governor-General Ratu Ganilau and Bavadra that would have had members of the Alliance and the FLP form a government of national unity.
The Taukei movement was outraged, and Rabuka, fearing that the chiefs could not weather the Melanesian-chauvinist storm, demobilised the Taukei by quickly dismissing Ganilau, annulling the 1970 constitution and declaring Fiji a republic.
To appease the Taukei, Rabuka's 1990 constitution was crudely weighted against the Indian Fijians, and electoral boundaries were gerrymandered to disadvantage Labour voters in urban areas and in the west.
Australia's reaction
Rabuka's May coup was loudly condemned by the Australian government. The provision of new aid to Fiji was suspended, as was Australia's Defence Cooperation Program. However, the economic sanctions called for by the deposed government were rejected by the Australian Labor government.
As Rabuka consolidated his power, Canberra's and Wellington's less than strident opposition softened further. By 1988, Australian aid had resumed.
The Australian government went so far as to claim that the racially discriminatory 1990 constitution had "restored a degree of representative government to Fiji by providing for an early return to elected government". The Defence Cooperation Program was restored to coincide with the first visit to Australia by Prime Minister Rabuka, elected under the race-based new constitution in 1992.
Australian capitalism has profitable links with Fiji. Australia is Fiji's most important trading partner, in 1997 being the destination of 33% of Fiji's exports and the source of 47% of its imports. Australia is Fiji's second largest aid donor (after Japan). Australian direct investment in Fiji is officially close to $600 million, and unofficial government estimates put it at almost twice that.
The Australian government's response to the 1987 coups (and their rerun in 2000) was weak because the Australian imperialists recognised that their considerable interests in Fiji were best served by the continued rule of the elite and the military's efforts to defend it.
Australian big business was not disappointed. In 1988, at the urging of the World Bank and the Australian government, Rabuka adopted a structural adjustment program that committed Fiji to privatisation, lower taxation, large cuts to government spending on health and education, reduced protection for local industries, wages cuts and growing unemployment.
By 1991, real wages had been reduced by more than 20%, and collective bargaining rights of trade unions had been severely restricted. In 1994, youth unemployment was 30-40% in urban areas. One family in three was living under the poverty line.
Ironically, such policies continued to drive forward the changes in Fijian society that will continue to undermine the chiefly elite's power.
Opposition to privatisation and support for trade union rights were important planks of the FLP's successful election campaign in 1999. At the same time, ballooning urban poverty and unemployment among a resentful and lumpenised layer of Melanesian-Fijian youth continues to provide new recruits for the Taukei who rallied around Speight and his henchmen.
As in 1987, the military took power after Speight's May 19 coup to block the threats to the elite posed by mass-based political movements from both the left and the right. As in 1987, the imperialist Australian government sides with the military because it also fears the consequences of the collapse of chiefly rule in Fiji.
BY NORM DIXON